Age
Age Age plays a large role in BwE. When first creating a character, you must choose your starting age (10-17). For every 20 minutes of real-time that passes, your age increases by 1. With the aging process you gain stats which are determined by your race, as well as Ability Points (AP). Once your character reaches the age of 20, you may be Reborn, which will allow you to choose a new race and starting age. After being reborn, you will lose all accumulated stats from aging and leveling -- however, you will keep your skills, AP, gold, titles and equipment. AP Growth Starting Age for Maximizing AP To max out the speed of AP gain, you are advised to rebirth as soon as you reach age 20 and always start with an age of 17. There is nearly no exception. (Well, you may wait a minute or two to gain the last XP missing for a level up.) If you are hunting AP, the only reasonable exception would be, if you will not be at place to do a rebirth after an hour. Therefore select your starting age to have your character reach an age of 20 when you are able to do so - or select 10 if it will take more than 3 hours and 20 minutes. This way, you get the bonus AP for a low age without wasting time. Calculations Gained AP/time primary depends on how many levels you can gain by the time you reach the age of 20 as you will see below. Using the AP Growth chart above, we can determine that: *If you start at 10, you gain 38 age AP + x level AP in 3h 20mins *If you start at 17, you gain 3 age AP + x level AP in 1h To find the level at which you would get the same amount of AP per hour, you can equate the 2 formulae: (38 + x) / 3.3333 = (3 + x) / 1 38 + x = 3.3333(3+x) 38 + x = 9.9999 + 3.3333x 38 - 9.9999 = 3.3333x - x 28.0001 / 2.3333 = x x = 12 So if you can reach level 12 or higher by the age of 20, you are better off starting at the age of 17, because you benefit from the AP for leveling up to 12 for 3.3333 times. As you can reach level 12 with any character starting at age 17 without doing anything whithin 40 minutes, age 17 is best. Counterarguments A 10 year old character will gain AP much faster than a 17 year old character as the younger one will gain 18 more AP than the older one in the first hour. For new characters this can make significant difference, equaling out the missing stats, because you can push your skills some ranks. This can enable you to kill faster or in a higher level area, gaining more XP and items, thereby leveling quicker and gaining more AP sooner. But you have to take into account that every level you are able to gain as a 17 year old character over the 12th level counts as 2.3333 AP more, because you can gain them 3.3333 times. This will be hard to counter. To get from level 12 to 15 for example, the younger one will need to more than double its XP while the older character will just needs to reach level 13. If you are able to reach level 30 as a 17 year old character, you have to reach level 66 as the 10 year old one to equal that out. So this option could only work for very skilled players and only for absolutely new characters. Testing will be needed if it is even possible. Test for higher Levels Dwarf, ~1500 CP. One started at age 10, the other at age 17. Same equipment, same skills at the same levels, both times through. Both were in the same area the entire time (Casterly Rock - Avg CP 1695). When he turned 20, the numbers were shown as follows: Age 10 to Age 20: Level reached: 40 Total AP gained: 77 (Age: 38, Level: 39) AP gain per hour: ~23.1 Age 17 to Age 20: Level reached: 35 Total AP gained: 37 (Age: 3, Level: 34) AP gain per hour: 37 Dwarf, ~3750 CP. Bow, both ranged attack skills + def skill, Wyl - Avg CP 1695, lvl 70 defensive pet (skills: taunt2 slayer defensive2 avoid2) Age 10 to Age 20: Level reached: 66 Total AP gained: 104 (Age: 38, Level: 66) AP gain per hour: 31,2 Age 17 to Age 20: Level reached: 53 (reached 28 after 5 mins (28+3=31) ->55 mins to do extra statpoints) Total AP gained: 56 (Age: 3, Level: 53) AP gain per hour: 56